Word Counts and Body Counts: On Video Games and the Writing Life

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1.
In 2009, a few weeks before the start of my last semester in college, I began living a double life as familiar as it was embarrassing. By day, I wrote fiction in the library, relegating myself to a windowless office to work on a thesis-cum-novel. By night, homework permitting, I played Grand Theft Auto IV. I blew through an average of three hours a day wreaking havoc in a virtual city. Whenever my classmates prodded me with questions about my work, I cited my latest word count as evidence of a Puritan industry. I failed to mention — I couldn’t mention — how closely it tracked with my body count.

Technology evolves, the culture changes, but gamers keep the mantle of delinquents. Even those few of us who profit off our hobby contend with a debilitating stigma. In his book Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, the writer Tom Bissell recounts how a girlfriend of his, upon witnessing a particularly egregious example of video game dialogue, immediately “revoked all vagina privileges until further notice.” As part of a 10-minute bit about the oddities of virtual avatars, the Irish comic Dara O’Briain, wringing his hands like a schoolboy caught stealing fruit snacks, jokes that video games rank on the Shame Scale up there with hardcore porn. In a piece for Kotaku, the blogger Mike Fahey tells how his ex-wife, shortly after claiming to accept his love of games, waited for him to leave for a conference and promptly moved out of the house. In spite of the fact that the games industry is now larger than Hollywood (and despite the critical apparatus being formed by new sites like Kill Screen), the medium and its constituents retain an adolescent air. For this reason above all others, playing games — even now — means losing a portion of your dignity.

I knew all this on that January day when I picked up Grand Theft Auto. I knew I was dooming myself to months of stagnant development. As I went back to my apartment, I thought of my father, circa 1997, rattling off a list of things I could learn if I stopped playing Mario. I could learn to play baseball, he said. I could learn to speak German or French. I did none of those things, and because of that I came to believe, as my father did, that games were a waste of my time. I came to regard them as relics of a self-hating era. If I were to pick them up again — especially with a thesis to finish — all it would do is negate my own better instincts.

But then, as the weeks wore on, I began to notice something strange. The more time I spent in Liberty City, the better I seemed to write. My antics in the game were helping me write my novel.

2.
Growing up, I knew that my father saw the rise of the games industry as a sign of cultural decay. To him, the cartridge was an emblem of sloth and crassness, incapable of providing the kind of enlightenment sought after by right-living adults. For much of my childhood, he forbade me from owning a console, on the grounds that letting me keep one in the house would “turn my brain into mush.” After two years of begging, he relented, but only on the condition that I limit my playtime each day. He drew up a tally — stuck via magnet to the fridge — that let him see at a glance how worrisome my habit was becoming. Eventually, as one hour a day became two, and then three, our schedule fell by the wayside. Unhappy with the seeming collapse of my self-discipline, my father resigned himself to a state of perma-disapproval.

For their part, my friends’ parents echoed my father’s discomfort, albeit with fewer barnburning lectures and warnings. Even during sleepovers — when diplomacy blunted the edge of familial conflicts — it was clear that gaming was a matter of household debate. On many weekends, the dynamic between the kids and the parents played out as a generational standoff: the kids play a game, the parents urge the kids to go outside, the kids make a promise to get some fresh air upon reaching some goalpost in the game. When the kids reach the goalpost, they decide to reach another one, which leads to them reneging on their vow to enjoy the nice weather. Unwilling to enforce harsh discipline, the parents crack a joke, the most common one being that their kids were the victims of alien bodysnatchers.

Beneath the levity of that joke was an important belief. Our parents thought video games were essentially complex toys. In classing them alongside comic books, Legos and action figures in the roll call of juvenilia, they managed to convince themselves our fervor had a sell-by date. In general, the culture supported them — the top place to buy games in my hometown was the local Toys “R” Us.

For used games, the number one choice was Funcoland, a chain that resembled a cross between Best Buy and KB Toys. The marketing in these places conveyed a distinct message: that games, like violent cartoons, were meant for 10-year-old boys.

For my friends and I, this kiddiness helped justify our obsession. We reasoned that, if it was true that games were made for our demographic, our parents should expect us to play them as much as we could. At the same time, however, the argument had a flip side: teenagers and adults looked down on gaming as beneath them by definition. In this way, we confirmed the existence of a nebulous sell-by date, an age when adolescence would force us to put down our controllers.

Every so often, I ran into peers who claimed to have moved past games. I remember one night in sixth grade, a night I spent at the house of my oldest friend. A couple of his neighbors flanked us on his living-room couch. We tore through a match of Killer Instinct, during which one of these neighbors, a kid wearing basketball shorts and a loose-fitting gray T-shirt, munched on handfuls of Tostitos and watched us play without comment. He never joined in, and when I asked him why, my friend explained that his neighbor had stopped playing games. “John’s pretty busy,” he said. John then delineated his schedule for the week, which included a fishing expedition, basketball practice, and working as a lifeguard at his pool. The subtext was obvious: John didn’t play games anymore because John was growing up.

3.
For months while writing my thesis, I hated the hours I spent every day in the library. To me, it seemed that no matter how hard I worked, no matter how long I stared at my gargantuan Word file, nothing I came up with evoked a palpable setting, at least not well enough to belong in a decent novel. To friends, I groused that my syntax was clunky, my imagery lifeless, my similes dead in the water. At times I wondered exactly where I stood on the spectrum of functional literacy.

In part, these thoughts explain why, after years of disinterest, I went back to my original sin. Like Netflix marathons, beer can towers, and drawers full of unwashed sweatpants, video games told the world loud and clear that a college kid was Giving Up Hope. Like cash left in front of a junkie, they stood for a fatal temptation. The story in which I was playing the main character is cliched but always tragic: the ne’er-do-well, given one last chance to work hard, gives in to his laziest impulse and blows his shot at success. In the context of that year, my choice was a form of self-sabotage.

Some have argued that in GTA IV, the star of the game is not the protagonist, Niko Bellic, but the fictional Liberty City. I grew to agree with this argument in the course of my defeatist campaign. Early on, Niko completes missions in Broker, Dukes, and Bohan, respective facsimiles of Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. The missions vary — one involves taking a local girl out on a date — but most of them force Niko to venture to unknown neighborhoods. Pinging from locale to locale, stealing cars and Hummers and trucks, Niko (which is to say the player) comes to know the geography of the city. In my case, it got to the point where, without consulting a map, I could drive from the South Bronx equivalent to the beach in pseudo-Bay Ridge.

It might not seem useful to memorize a virtual city. As pointless activities go, it ranks near learning Klingon. Yet I couldn’t help but notice that, as my faculties developed, they bled into the rest of my life. On campus, I paid more attention to byways, shortcuts, and alleys, enough so that my travel time from class to class went down. My body felt more dextrous, less likely to drop or spill things. Persnickety facts and statistics gradually became easier to recall. And back in my carrel, I found a new confidence. I didn’t dread my work as I had before I picked up the game.

At first I chalked this up to the fact that the game relaxed me. Few things help relieve pressure like indulging in a childhood passion. But then my adviser, a man who didn’t know what I did in my spare time, made clear he was seeing improvements in my drafts. In meetings, he said my dialogue was tighter, my sentences leaner, my character portrayals more accurate. He congratulated me on ridding my drafts of tiny grammatical snafus. Apart from the easy explanation — that months of practice were finally paying off — I never said a word about where this improvement came from. I figured it wasn’t possible, no matter the weight of the evidence.

Later on, some years after I graduated, I stumbled upon a few writers who’d noted similar connections. In Extra Lives, Tom Bissell describes the typical platformer in explicitly literary terms, labeling the modern-day heir of Donkey Kong a “strange, nonverbal poem” — one that, like a poem, “does not disguise the fact that it is designed, contains things you cannot immediately see, and rewards those willing to return to them again and again.” Junot Diaz, in a review of GTA IV, shed light on the storytelling failures that kept it from being a masterpiece, implying that a competent story might have raised it to the level of a good novel. Nathan Englander, in conversation with Rivka Galchen, praisesGears of War as a “magnificent” accomplishment that creates “new narrative spaces.” Like the journalists now forming a critical discourse around games, these novelists recognize the birth of a serious art form.

I’d be lying if I said these appraisals weren’t gratifying. On occasion, I wished I could go back in time, to 1997, and tell my 10-year-old self there was no good reason to feel ashamed. I’d tell that miserable, guilt-ridden kid that huge numbers of people, successful adults with mortgages and publications and families, loved playing video games just as much as he did. Above all, I’d tell him to please sit tight and wait.

4.
In high school, I went through a long stretch when I rarely (if ever) played games, though not because I got sick of butting heads with my father. I gave up because, in the way of teenagers everywhere, I discovered other things to do. I diverted my free time from upcoming games to follow music and culture on sites like Pitchfork and Slate. At the same time, I met gamers who were drug addicts, dropouts, and poor students, whose lives did more to convince me to quit than years of disdainful lectures. The more I read, the more effort I devoted to writing, schoolwork, and music. From this my parents concluded that games had been part of a phase.

Then, one week in my first semester of college, I got in an accident that forced me to stay in my dorm. I was taking a Kung Fu class as part of a phys ed requirement (really). My flying jump kick went all right, but I botched the landing, cracking my ankle upon contact with the ground. Incapacitated, I asked my sister to send up my PS2. For the next two months, I played through Final Fantasy X, working through its puzzles while my cohort went off to parties.

What’s interesting is how many hallmates came in to watch me play. Crowds of eight or 10 guys (and they were always guys) stopped by on weekday nights, elbowing each other for space on the carpet of my unkempt dorm room. I looked over this crowd of my peers and saw that good kids — the kinds of kids you expect to chase after their loftiest goals — enjoyed immersing themselves in this world as much as I did. I didn’t know for certain if their parents disapproved like mine had, but I guessed, judging from the number of bashful faces in the room, that many if not most of us were part of a quiet solidarity. Come look, our actions told our stern-faced elders. Come look at us wasting away.

5.
To graduate college in 2009 was to hear how unlucky you were. It meant watching as friends moved home and fought to land part-time gigs. It meant finding, the moment you finished the gauntlet of the American college experience, that now your days were composed of endless, unstructured free time. At that point your choice became to live as an autodidact — a path we might call the Way of the Ambitious — or else to give in to a long-dormant penchant for apathy.

For most people I knew, seesawing between the two options proved to be the way to get by. Three- and four-day weekends curled up with Office reruns gave way to nine-day-periods of frenzied job-hunting and study. Upon signing the lease for my first apartment in New York, I vowed to spend whatever time I wasn’t looking for jobs reading classic fiction and crafting a series of short stories. I did read more, and I did write often, but somehow — predictably — I got addicted to retro games.

It was shameful, or so I thought. The guilt that haunted me as a college senior (that here I was wasting time allotted for study) transmogrified into fears that I was a bad adult. My enjoyment of Super Metroid, interpreted through the lens of these fears, had nothing to do with the game’s eerie world or brilliant, exploratory mechanics. It represented a need to be unproductive, to refuse to work on myself in a measurable, dignified way.

To combat these fears, I told myself — as new graduates have since the beginning of time — that everything would sort itself out once my career finally took off in earnest. In September, I landed an internship, which then led to a part-time job, which then led to a full-time job on the 10th floor of a SoHo skyscraper. Like many New Yorkers, I suspect, adulthood crept up on me in increments, rearing its head first as residence in a decent neighborhood, then as a working knowledge of the city, then as a nine-to-five job at a company whose name strangers would recognize. Yet throughout it all, I kept playing games — sometimes for an hour a week, sometimes for two hours a day, but always enough that some part of me could hide out in a game when I chose.

Last year I left New York to get a Master’s degree in Dublin. I packed my PS3 in a storage container the week before I lit out. As I did, I told myself this was really the end, a sign to the universe that I was now ready to cast off childish things. It marked the last time I’ve played a game since then. Right now I can’t say whether my life has improved, nor can I say that I feel more secure in my maturity. Wherever the truth lies, I know that if the need ever strikes me — if the urge that first struck me at six years old returns in full force — my downfall and my joy is in a Brooklyn warehouse, waiting.

Thomas Beckwith
is a staff writer for The Millions and an MFA candidate at Johns Hopkins. Prior to coming to Baltimore, he studied literature and worked in IT while living in Dublin, Ireland. You can find him on Twitter at @tdbeckwith.

As the media phenomenon du jour, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has put pressure on the commentariat to provide Potter-related context or controversy - anything to get readers to spend a few minutes with us, rather than J.K. Rowling! And herein lies a danger: in our zeal to ride Harry's coattails (broomstick?) to glory, we Muggles are tempted to wave a wand over our own preconceptions and imagine them transfigured into news. In that vein, an article in last week's Washington Post provoked our interest here at The Millions, while contradicting my own sense of how the Potter books function within the enchanted kingdom of childhood. I specifically remembered Cynthia Oakes, a middle-school librarian at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, telling me some years ago about a book her students had gone wild for, and recommending I check out Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Hoping to get some ground-level perspective on Pottermania, I got in touch with her (which wasn't hard; she's my mother-in-law) and asked if she'd mind revisiting the Potter books in a bit more depth. I had misplaced my Quick-Quotes Quills, but she graciously consented to be interviewed through the magic of email. [Editor's note: Scroll down to view Oakes' post-Hogwarts syllabus.]Opening the Chamber of Secrets"There is a wonderful bookstore in Hyde Park," Oakes told me, "57th Street Books, where my colleagues and I often go to buy the latest children's and young-adult titles. The children's buyer at the time, author Franny Billingsley (The Folk Keeper), told us that there was a new British fantasy novel out, and the word in England was that it was wildly popular. We bought a copy, read it, liked it, recommended it to a couple of kids, and put it on our summer reading list. By the end of the summer, the idea of our introducing anyone to Harry Potter was beyond laughable. That's how quickly it became a phenomenon. Kids told kids, who told other kids, who told still more kids - and that was that."Initially, adults were out of the loop - which was great! It was remarkable, from my point of view, to see any book capture these kids' imaginations and hearts so completely." Oakes offered some further context: "This was right around time that the term 'digital natives' was being coined. As school librarians we were being led to believe that the future, and especially our future, lay in the Internet - that students were no longer interested in print. Then the iPod came out; once again, we were told that the future lay in digital whatever... and suddenly our middle school library alone had to buy seven copies of Sorcerer's Stone. All copies were instantly checked out and the hold list was huge."Then kids learned that the sequel was out in England. It was unprecedented to have them beg their parents to plan summer vacations to the UK around the publication of a book. One family, who actually did vacation in the UK that summer, brought back a copy of Chamber of Secrets. We ended up buying four copies of the next two installments. After that, kids were buying the books for themselves so we didn't need to invest quite so heavily in order to provide access. We now have two shelves of the library devoted to six titles. I'm not sure if we'll need to buy more than one copy of the latest book, since the sales of this title have been astronomical. I can assure you that no other series even come close to it in popularity."Apropos of families vacationing across the pond, Oakes said she couldn't generalize about any connections between the books' success and social class. But as Chicago's Lab School is a well-regarded private school, she could attest to the books' strong appeal to upper-middle class, affluent kids. That appeal, she noted, "doesn't seem to be contingent upon gender or race."A Hogwarts of the Mind"I think what makes these books so seductive," Oakes told me, "is that the world Rowling has created is a world kids really, really, really want to live in. Actually live in, not just imagine living in. They want to eat the candy, ride the train, wear the uniforms, own the brooms, play the games, study the magic, get mail from the owls, look at the maps, and spy from the folds of an invisible cape. Who wouldn't want to be a member of the Weasley family? And who wouldn't want Ron, Hermione, or Harry for a friend? Or Hagrid for a teacher? I am always amazed at how even a 14-year-old will still harbor the secret hope that Hogwarts is real." Oakes remembers "being quite surprised when a fifth-grader confided in me that he was not able to get the spells to work. He wondered what he was doing wrong and he looked so forlorn while furtively whispering all this to me."From a literary point of view, I'm not the first person to observe that these books are unique in combining the most popular of children's literary genres into one rollicking story: horror, sports, adventure, school story, fantasy, romance, animal fantasy, family problems, etc. That gives them appeal among a broad array of readers. In addition, they are page-turners for kids who love plot-driven books and have satisfying characters for kids who prefer character-driven novels. It doesn't hurt that the central character is a misfit without parents... a key ingredient to most successful children's lit. What child, tethered to family and home, wouldn't love to step through a magic portal where she instantly becomes the hero of the universe?"One must also remark on their unusual length. A 900-page kids book? Unheard of. And equally rare is a sequel that doesn't have an 'our-story-so-far' component. Rowling rightly acknowledges the depth of her fans' understanding of all the previous books by jumping right into the thick of the story. It is very difficult to read Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban without having read Sorcerer's Stone and Chamber of Secrets. And if you are starting with Book Seven, forget it!"Dark Art"My experience has taught me that kids will rarely choose to read a book that isn't entertaining and will avoid an instructive book as if it had spattergroit," Oakes continued. "This isn't to say that they avoid books with ideas. I harbor the belief that they prefer them. The Potter books are entertaining, but darkly so. They deal with real evil - Voldemort is crueler than the cruelest classmate. Harry has to wrestle with whatever part he may have played in his own parents' death. Thoughtless actions in these books have far-reaching and horrific consequences."This is also more psychologically nuanced fantasy world than many contemporary books offer, with every character suffering from his own particular character flaw. Yet a truly noble and ethical solution to every problem is always apparent. I believe that our kids long for that sort of clearly delineated ethical world.They are discovering that the adults around them, much like Dumbledore, are not perfect. They want their friends, just like Ron, always to return to them. And they want Harry to make the right choices (perhaps because if he does, then they will). The books instruct, then, in the way the best books do: by allowing the characters to fail. Whether or not the Potter books are helping to define anyone's moral universe, I can't tell. But contrary to the opinions of some commentators, they surely aren't destroying anyone's moral universe..."She ventured a critique: "I know the books are flawed, and most of the books - certainly Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, could have used a seriously talented editor. Or just an editor." Still, she said, "They are remarkable. It's not popular to admit it, but when I read the first book I had to get up at three a.m. to finish it. As an unreconstructed bibliophile, of course I love these books... I am a fan."Fresh out of veritaserum, I tested the truth of this last assertion by asking Oakes some targeted questions. Her favorite character? "As a woman and an educator, I have to love Professor McGonagall." Favorite villain(s)? "The dementors. I've certainly run across my share of soul-suckers and they scare me to death." Favorite setting? "I love Hogwarts and wish that I worked there. It has an amazing library and I would love to recommend books to Hermione. And have her recommend a few to me! Not to mention the fact that I'd get to hide from and/or fight trolls, death-eaters, and so on."Ordinary Wizarding Levels (O.W.L.s)"Most assuredly there is a social aspect to the Harry Potter phenomenon," Oakes said. "Kids sit around for HOURS discussing all the ins and outs of the books. They join online discussion groups, download podcasts, and know every website devoted to Harry. They create group Halloween costumes. In fact, fans were so enthralled by the books that they rushed into the library (en masse) the second, the very second, the cover art for Book Seven had been revealed. We had to display it at the circulation desk. (I mean, our credibility would have taken a serious nose dive if we hadn't.) Then, they congregated around the printout of the cover and discussed THAT for hours."I asked her if kids outgrow Harry. "Some students lose interest (or say they do), but a remarkable number do not. I overheard many conversations in the high school hallway prior to Book Seven that centered around horcruxes, Harry, and death. Our high-school librarians have all the Potter books on the shelves. The fifth grade to whom we recommended the first book graduated last year. So most of these kids grew up reading Harry Potter. I've watched high-school students sneak back into the middle school library to keep up on their favorite series books and their favorite authors. And I say, good for them!" No Argus Filch, my mother-in-law."As for the hoopla," she said, "the books have been very good for children and for young-adult publishing... Their sheer popularity forced The New York Times to create a children's literature bestseller list. (Ha!) These days our kids are reading just as much as - if not more than - they did before."As we'd discussed, "J.K. Rowling came at a crucial moment... However, I do wish the publishers would realize there isn't going to be another Harry Potter and ease up on all the fantasy that's coming down the pike. I worry that really good young-adult novels are getting overlooked. The hoopla has also turned off many new young readers. Whereas the initial impetus to read the books came from kids, there's now a huge media machine cramming those same books down our collective throat."Flourish and BlottsI asked Oakes if she could elaborate on "the good stuff" by furnishing Millions readers with some recommendations for post-Hogwarts reading. "Middle schoolers love serial storytelling," she said. "That is part of the success of the Harry Potter books. I can think of many recent series that have met with remarkable success: the Alex Rider series, the Warriors series, the Princess Diary series, the Eragon series, the Spiderwick Chronicles - to name a few off the top of my head. Students will request the next book in the series sometimes months in advance. Because of Amazon.com, they know approximately when the book will be published. We librarians are forced, more than ever, to stay on top of things. However, I can think of no other book or series that would compel students and parents to attend a midnight party in order to obtain the sequel. That is purely a Harry Potter thing. We've had kids counting down the days to publication since December."I would love for kids to love J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, because they are such elegant writers. Certainly there are kids who read Tolkien and Lewis, and often prefer it, but it doesn't follow that a Potter fan is automatically a Bilbo Baggins fan. Tolkien is much harder to read, for one thing, and the works of C.S. Lewis don't feel as contemporary as Rowling's do. The latest, coolest reading trend amongst my students is graphic novels."When recommending a book to Potter enthusiasts, Oakes always asks, "What part of Harry Potter is your favorite part? The school, the family problems, the sports, horror, the magic...?" Then, she says, "I come up with some titles based on the answer. It's surprising to me how often students want to read about boarding schools and about all things English... and I can't resist recommending the great contemporary English author Hilary McKay. Read The Exiles and see if you can stop reading the rest of her work. It's not fantasy, but it is quintessentially English."She went on to offer a post-Hogwarts syllabus of fantasy books:Young Adult/Older ReadersUrsula K.Leguin. The Earthsea Cycle. (A quest series with wizards and dragons.)Patricia McKillup. The Riddle-Master of Hed. (A quest series with wizards and mysteries.)Garth Nix. The Abhorsen Trilogy. (A dark fantasy that features necromancy and romance.)Philip Pullman. His Dark Materials. (Parallel worlds that collide in Oxford. As much science-fiction as fantasy.)Middle ReadersLloyd Alexander. The Chronicles of Prydain. (A quest series with an oracular pig; highly recommended byThe Millions.)Eoin Colfer. Artemis Fowl. (Contemporary magic which relies on technology. Spies!)Diana Wynne Jones. The Chronicles of Chrestomanci. (Parallel worlds; magic; families in all their dysfunction and glory.)Jenny Nimmo. Children of the Red King. (Wizards go to a school quite different from Hogwarts!)"Many kids don't want to be perceived as Potter groupies," Oakes noted. "It's interesting, though, how many will reluctantly pick one of the books up, then get sucked right in to the world Rowling has created. It is almost impossible to resist the spell of the Potter books. Having said that, I'll be very curious to see how they age."

The comic sociopaths are so desperate to be taken seriously that they can never be taken seriously, and so fumbling and impotent in their attempts that you know they will only get themselves into trouble.

Earlier this week we took a qualitative look at recent fiction in the New Yorker, and now, with help from a Millions reader, we're going to take a quantitative look.Last year, Frank Kovarik, who writes and teaches English in St. Louis, sent us a spreadsheet that he has used to catalog New Yorker fiction since 2003. We looked at the numbers last year, and now, with another year of data included, were going to revisit Frank's spreadsheet.Frank's spreadsheet records not just the titles and authors, but things like gender, country of origin, and frequency of appearance. He also includes his own personal quality rating for each story (your mileage may vary).Frank has once again generously offered to make his spreadsheet available to Millions readers. If you're interested, you can see it here.With six years of fiction compiled, we can get some hard info on the New Yorker's tendencies.Frequency: The headline takeaway from this exercise is just how many of the stories that appear in the New Yorker come from just a few writers. Just nine writers account for 73 (or 23%) of the 312 stories to appear over the last six years. Just 18 writers account for 118 (or 38%) of the stories. When discussing New Yorker fiction, I often hear complaints about how rarely the magazine surprises readers with talented but less well known writers. This is undoubtedly a valid complaint. While many of the New Yorker's favorite fiction writers happen to be brilliant masters of the form - Alice Munro and George Saunders come to mind - it's also true that readers can grow weary of these same voices recurring again and again. On the flip side of this argument, however, there are 76 writers who have each appeared a single time in the New Yorker over the last six years (almost 13 per year), though only nine one-timers appeared in 2008.Gender: Of the 312 stories in the New Yorker from 2003 through 2008, 119 or 38.1% were penned by women. (That's up from 37.4% last year.)Nationality: The fiction section of the New Yorker is a pretty multi-cultural place, but Americans still make up the bulk of the contributors. 157 of the stories, or 50% (down from 52% after 2007), are American (and this leaves off several writers who could be conceivably classified as both American and a native of another country). Coming in in second are the Brits at 22 stories and in third the Irish at 21 stories.Returning to the frequency question, below are all the writers who have appeared in the New Yorker at least five times over the last six years. These are the superstars of New Yorker fiction:12:Alice Munro10:William Trevor8:T. Coraghessan BoyleTessa Hadley7:Louise ErdrichJohn UpdikeRoddy DoyleHaruki Murakami6:Thomas McGuane5:Antonya NelsonTobias WolffGeorge SaundersCharles D'AmbrosioJonathan LethemEdward P. JonesRoberto BolañoLara Vapnyar

I was in college when I discovered The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. It was my sophomore year, and the novel had been assigned in my literary criticism and theory course, my first introduction to the English department's upper-division, a place I'd fantasized about almost since I learned to read. I was 19. Before that semester, I had never heard the words "semiotics" or "simulacrum" or "cyborg;" I thought "PoMo" was just a silly nickname for the too-cool seniors who smoked outside the library in tight pants and pointy Beatles boots. I was a baby, basically.
I still recall the day I started The Handmaid's Tale. It swept me away even as I underlined sentence after sentence, convinced that the narrator's musings on language and storytelling would be discussed later in class. "My self is a thing I must now compose as one composes a speech," Offred narrates early on. "What I must present is a made thing, not something born." I haven't since found another book that captures as well as Atwood's does the power of language and storytelling, how our identities are made and unmade by narrative.
That first time, I read for hours: on my narrow bed, and then on the floor, in the middle of my dorm room. Later that same evening, or maybe the next, I read some of the book aloud to my roommate, who kept falling asleep as I did so. Every few minutes, she'd wake up and describe to me her dreamscape, altered by Atwood's descriptions. "Keep going," she'd say and close her eyes again.
(Years later, I would dream that I was Offred, trapped on a large cruise ship, trying to escape some unseen threat. The memory of those dark, wood-paneled hallways, and my robe and wimple, still gives me the chills.)
I've since returned to The Handmaid's Tale three more times, and on each read, it astonishes me. I love the novel's insistence on back story, on Offred's need to conjure a time when she still had her old identity, her "shining name," when she and her best friend Moira were allowed to go to college, and smoke cigarettes, and make tasteless jokes ("It sounds like a dessert. Date rapé"). The novel imagines America as a totalitarian Christian state that has stripped the rights of women, and although it does so vividly and powerfully, the dystopian premise is never central to my reading experience. I always fixate instead on Offred's language play, and on the way she comprehends herself -- and her female body -- in this new world. Stories pass the time, yes, but they're also a lifeline to the past, and they allow Offred to function in this terrible new world: "One detaches oneself," she narrates, "one describes."
The Handmaid's Tale not only speculates a new world, filled with Unwomen, Pornomarts, and Birthmobiles, it also mourns the one that is gone. For instance, when Offred describes the housekeeper knocking on Offred's door before entering, she says: "I like her for that. It means she thinks I have some of what we used to call privacy left." For Atwood, the speculative effort is to imagine not just what the future might bring, but also what it might take away.
I was thinking about The Handmaid's Tale as I read MaddAddam, the final book in Atwood's latest dystopian trilogy, for it also imagines a dark future. The three more recent novels in Atwood's oeuvre, however, which take place after a super-virus has eradicated most of humankind, are far more science-oriented than The Handmaid's Tale. Here, Atwood is primarily interested in the havoc wrought by genetic splicing and bio-engineering; instead of a Christian theocracy, money-hungry corporations run the government.
In the trilogy's first book, Oryx and Crake, the main character, Snowman, is the lone human being among a new species known as Crakers, who were created in a laboratory by Snowman's best friend, Crake. The perfect and beautiful Crakers eat leaves and their own excrement, and their urine wards off dangerous predators. The second book, The Year of the Flood, takes place at the same time that Oryx and Crake does, but it focuses on two female survivors of the apocalypse, Toby and Ren, who were once members of an ecology-based religion called God's Gardeners. Their past overlaps with Snowman's, and readers of both books will delight in seeing just how.
In these first two novels, the majority of the narrative is exposition dispensed via flashback. In fact, as I mentioned in a previous essay, much of the narrative drive comes from the reader wanting to know what in the bleep happened here?! In both novels, the present-day scenes cover very little time, and, save for a flurry of drama in the final third, not much occurs, action-wise. By contrast, the exposition in each book covers years: whole childhoods, a love affair or two, and the rise and fall of close friendships. In these flashbacks, Atwood anchors her sweeping sci-fi future with intimate, human conflicts. If Atwood were to cut out the back story in these novels, there wouldn't be enough left for a book-length work. The past is what matters, and it's what moves us.
Once the reader gets to MaddAddam, so much of this world has already been built (and stunningly so) that there's a heavier expectation for the book's present to provide the thrills. Unfortunately, that doesn't quite happen. There isn't much for Atwood's characters to do; Toby, Ren, Snowman, and a handful of former members of God's Gardeners and the eco-terrorist group MaddAddam have reunited in a ruined world, but the threats they face as a group feel relatively minor. I suppose, once the world has ended, the urgency gets sucked right out of one's day.
What MaddAddam lacks in terms of story, it makes up for with its keen investigation of story itself: of its persistence, and our persistent need for it. As brilliant as he was, Snowman's friend Crake could not create an improved species that didn't sing -- or, it turns out, one that also didn't seek out a cosmology. Crakers long for stories about their creator, and it's up to the humans in the book to provide them. In the trilogy's first and third books we get the tales that Snowman and Toby tell these curious listeners, and the human-to-Craker translations are entertaining and enlightening. In MaddAddam, Toby wonders: "What kind of story -- what kind of history, will be of any use at all, to people she can't know will exist, in the future she can't foresee?" When Toby teaches a child Craker how to write, she wonders, "How soon before there are ancient texts they feel they have to obey but have forgotten how to interpret? Have I ruined them?" Again, Atwood returns to her longtime interest in storytelling. Narrative makes us human, it informs us about ourselves and the world, it teaches us empathy; it can also constrain us, and much can be lost in the telling, or not told at all. In The Handmaid's Tale, Offred thinks, "We lived in the gaps between the stories." In MaddAddam, Toby thinks, "There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too."
It's not only the Crakers who require narrative in MaddAddam, it's the human players, too. Toby needs to know who her new lover (and old friend) Zeb was, before they met. The story of his past reveals him, and brings them closer. Zeb's past is filtered by Toby's narration, and the reader also gets the version told to the Crakers. The past only exists as long as we tell it, and the telling is the tricky part.
Occasionally, Zeb's story threatens to dissolve under the weight of Atwood's sci-fi jargon:
"Maybe he knew about some of Zeb's earlier capers and was hiring for a hithert0-unknown bunch of darksiders who wanted Zeb to tackle a bolus of seriously forbidden hackery; or maybe it was an extortion outfit after some plutocrat, or a hireling connected with IP thieves who needed a skein of professional trackwork to further their kidnapping of a Corps brainiac."
Most of the time, though, his past sings with drama: familial dysfunction, globetrotting, computer hacking, and even bear eating. One can almost feel Atwood's glee in lines like: "anyone who'd listen to him would be credited with a terminal case of brain herpes." It's impossible not to love a writer in her 70s who uses the word "lulz."
Atwood's dry humor and her continual interest in gender and the body are also on full display in MaddAddam. Zeb's story, to Toby's chagrin, is peppered with details of his past lovers, and in the story's present, Toby is hounded by her jealousy of Swift Fox, a younger female member of MaddAddam:
Toby knows she's resenting the snide innuendos Swift Fox aimed at her earlier, not to mention the gauzy shift and the cute shorts. And the breast weaponry, and the girly-girl pigtails. They don't go with your budding wrinkles, she feels like saying. Tanning takes its toll.
As all three books in Atwood's trilogy attest, an apocalypse won't destroy romantic attraction, longing, or jealousy, nor will it dismantle gender roles -- if anything, these are magnified. Atwood's characters have bodies, and she doesn't let us forget that fact. (At the end of the world, people will still look at your ass, which is both a problem and a comfort. )
MaddAddam may not be Atwood's strongest work, but the world she foresees in this trilogy is frighteningly realistic and vividly imagined, and one must read all three novels to get the complete picture. It's no Handmaid, but that's okay. I've been chasing that literary dragon for 13 years...and counting.

There's an old Woody Allen nightclub routine, dating back to his stand-up days in the mid-60s, that goes a little like this:"I was in Europe many years ago with Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway had just written his first novel, and Gertrude Stein and I read it, and we said that is was a good novel, but not a great one, and that it needed some work, but it could be a fine book. And we laughed over it. Hemingway punched me in the mouth.That winter Picasso lived on the Rue d'Barque, and he had just painted a picture of a naked dental hygienist in the middle of the Gobi Desert. Gertrude Stein said it was a good picture, but not a great one, and I said it could be a fine picture. We laughed over it and Hemingway punched me in the mouth.Francis Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald came home from their wild New Years Eve party. It was April. Scott had just written Great Expectations, and Gertrude Stein and I read it, and we said it was a good book, but there was no need to have written it, 'cause Charles Dickens had already written it. We laughed over it, and Hemingway punched me in the mouth.That winter we went to Spain to see Manolete fight, and he looked to be eighteen, and Gertrude Stein said no, he was nineteen, but that he only looked eighteen, and I said sometimes a boy of eighteen will look nineteen, whereas other times a nineteen year old can easily look eighteen... That's the way it is with a true Spaniard. We laughed over that... and Gertrude Stein punched me in the mouth."Alan Rudolph's 1988 film The Moderns dips into the same well. Set in Paris, in 1926, the central story is a fictional love-triangle. Weaving in and out of the story, however, are Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, being oh so iconic and giving the film much of its historical flavor, and its humor."Modern" is certainly a fluid term, and to flatly state that any one era permanently defines the term is, I suppose, arrogant. But Paris in the early part of last century, and in particular the 1920s was, indeed, a remarkable era of Modernism in which literature, visual arts, music and the theories behind all of these not only propelled themselves forward but bounced off of each other.And at the centre of it all was Gertrude Stein, mentor to such then-unknown writers as Ernest Hemingway, champion of unknown painters like Matisse and Picasso, writer and linguistic innovator who would herself be influenced by Picasso's stylistic shifts to the point where her own writing was seen as cubist. Her Saturday night salons brought together the painters and writers who are now seen as being the stars of the modern era. She introduced the world to the Moderns.The best memoir of this remarkable era is Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. Written late in his life, these twenty short, masterfully crafted vignettes depict his life in Paris from 1921 to 1926, a period of tutelage, as it were, at the feet of Gertrude Stein, whose pronouncements on what was "important" and what was "modern," were taken as gospel by the young writers and painters of Paris. Stein impressed upon Hemingway the necessity of choosing the exact words to convey the reality of the story, a lesson which informed everything he would write.A Moveable Feast is also a memoir of a place, specifically Montparnasse on Paris' left bank. We see Hemingway at home with his wife Hadley and small child, braving cold Parisian winters. We see him in the cafes and bars of the quarter, surrounded by strangers, yet blocking them out and focusing on the writing at hand. We see his blossoming friendship with the troubled Fitzgerald, and his association with Ezra Pound. It's a fascinating collection of stories, and remains my favorite Hemingway book. You feel like you're reading a fine short-story collection. These tales easily match the clean, precise prose of his best short fiction. Except, I realize, for the "fiction" part. But that's nitpicking.Another book that covers some of the same territory, and features many of the same players, is Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. This memoir, written by Stein in the 1930s, adopts the gossipy, conversational tone of her partner, Miss Toklas, recounting the story of her life, and centering on her relationship with Miss Stein, who effectively becomes the central character, the catalyst in this "autobiography." So, despite the title, it's really an autobiography of Gertrude Stein herself, who suspends her normally abstract literary style to assume the voice of Miss Toklas. Which I admit all seems very post-modern for a memoir by and of one of "the moderns." The conceit - adopting Miss Toklas's voice, spares the reader what might have been a head-scratchingly abstract memoir. On the other hand, Stein's adoption of her partner's flighty tone fills the memoir with an inordinate amount of frivolousness and gossip.Still, there's enough meat in this memoir to make it a must-read for anyone interested in this era of literature and painting. Stein, through Toklas's eyes, gives us glimpses into the formative years of the wonderful composer Erik Satie, and era-defining painters such as Picasso and Matisse, who were regulars at Stein's salons, and whose early works were on display at the Montparnasse home shared by Stein and Toklas. And, not surprisingly, young Hemingway makes several appearances in Stein's memoir. A favorite of hers (though, seemingly, less so of Alice's) we see her intellectually doting on him with great affection. And, as in Hemingway's memoir, Paris itself is a character, both Montparnasse on the left bank, and also the storied Montmartre further north.As it happens, I was in Paris in early September, having come up by train from southwestern France, and was met at the Gare d'Austerlitz by my friends Doug and Anna who had come down from London. Item one on the agenda: a lingering lunch, replete with champagne, wines, and spirits at the Closerie de Lilas, a favorite haunt of Hemingway's, and a locale that figures prominently in A Moveable Feast. This set the tone for the next few days. If Hemingway ate or drank or wrote there, who are we to walk by without symbolically paying our respects.It's all a romantic conceit, of course. Paris moved on after the "Modern" era ended, but for fans of Hemingway and the Moderns, why not let A Moveable Feast spread itself before us? Place Contrescarpe, rue Cardinal Lemoine, the Pantheon: there they are. There's something to be said for sitting on a stoop across from the Pantheon at two in the morning, Doug and Anna poring over the map, me staring at the Pantheon, mesmerized by its grandeur, my stupor enhanced doubly by the two a.m. September stillness.The adventure continued the next day. Anna having returned to London, Doug and I decided to trek up through Montparnasse, across the river, through central Paris, up to Picasso's digs. Up to Montmartre. Me hobbling, having fallen moments after stepping onto the sidewalk.I do this. I fall down a lot. A flight of recently polished stairs, I can careen down it in half a second. Stepping off my old back porch after a light snowfall? I become a gymnast, somersaulting down with expertise. And then there's the now-legendary "incident" on the stairs leading down to London's Leicester Square tube station a few years ago. I slipped on the rain-slicked top step and bounced down the remainder, with no one, NO ONE, seeming to notice.So there I was, limping my way from Montparnasse up to Montmartre, looking like a transplanted Ratzo Rizzo to my friend Doug's Joe Buck, knowing that somehow, somewhere, Ernest Hemingway was shaking his head and Gertrude Stein was rolling her eyes. But what the hell, in our post-modern world, you're only modern once.

1.In high school I had to read a lot of William Faulkner. An ambitious literature teacher fresh from Davidson College introduced us to The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Light in August in a single semester. Of course it was torture, subjecting the linear teenage mind to such non-linear narration, but something about Faulkner stuck, and one day on winter break, as a storm dropped a thin blanket of snow on Atlanta, I picked up The Reivers.
Suddenly Faulkner changed. So accessible. So clear. So page-turning. I would later read critics who breezily called the Pulitzer Prize-winning book lighthearted, narratively simple, and, for these reasons, atypical Faulkner (“affectingly wistful,” Jonathan Yardley wrote). It was, as they say today, a fun read, maybe (it was implied) too much so for a heavyweight such as the bard from Oxford.
But later in life I returned to Faulkner much in the way you return to the music of your youth. And on closer inspection it struck me that nothing about The Reivers was simple. In fact, the book, a thematic wolf in sheep’s clothing, was (and remains) one of the weightiest road-trip novels ever written. The Reivers, in essence, gets very meta about movement.
2.The Odyssey, On the Road, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance -- these books capture long-duration mobility as a backdrop to drama. But in The Reivers, movement itself is the drama, not to mention the quickening pulse of Yoknapatawpha, a place where, the closer you look, the more the characters materialize by gathering moss.
The book opens with a mobility upgrade. Boon Hoggenbeck steals (reives -- it’s a Scottish term) Lucius Priest’s grandfather’s car so he can drive from Jefferson to Memphis to visit a prostitute named Miss Corrie. Before Boon departs, Lucius, aged 11, convinces him to bring him along for the ride. En route, they discover that Ned McCaslin, a black man who tends to Lucius’s grandfather’s horses, is hiding in the back seat. As the car fills with characters, The Reivers indeed becomes affectingly wistful, with Huck Finnish coming-of-age excitement leavening the trip.
Matters become a little heavier in Memphis. Boon drops Lucius at Miss Reba’s brothel and goes searching for his “girlfriend.” Ned, in the plot’s pivotal scene, secretly barters the stolen car -- the first car in Yoknawpatapha County (where it’s 1905) -- for a horse -- “Coppermine” -- he plans to train up and race hard at a local track (under the new nom de guerre “Lightening”). With the proceeds, Ned vows to buy back the vehicle and allow the dividends to speak to his considerable equine expertise.
Critics have long characterized The Reviers as a soft critique of modernization. It’s certainly that. Horses and mules haul so many themes around Faulkner’s novels that it seems appropriate for him to grant the beasts an 11-hour paean (this was his last novel), which he does by favorably juxtaposing the car’s defects with the horse’s reliability.
One example stands out. Midway to Memphis, Priest’s hijacked car gets stuck in a mud hole. The men struggle to wedge it out with iron bars and a plank of wood, but the vehicle -- “so huge and so immobile” -- proves to be “too fixed and foundational.” Defeated, Boon pays the mud hole’s owners a few bucks to have the car dislodged by a couple of mules, animals he later describes as “already obsolete before they were born.”
What follows is as arresting as anything Faulkner ever wrote. In an instant, the car morphs from an icon of progress into a “mechanical toy rated in power and strength by the dozens of horses.” It’s no longer a shiny symbol of a modernizing South, but an instant fossil, something you’d discover in layers of bedrock, an object that’s “helpless and impotent in the almost infantile clutch of a few inches of the temporary confederation of two mild and specific elements -- earth and water.” The horse, an animal Faulkner deeply understood, triumphs over the car.
But Faulkner is hunting more substantial game here. He’s after the very morality of movement itself. In Western thought, the link between movement and morality is by no means self-evident or routinely explored. But to migrate, by definition, is to go astray. And to go astray is to err -- to be errant -- and, in turn, to be flawed, or at least radically open to its possibilities. The Reivers honors this definition, allowing movement to constitute error -- personal, historical, collective error -- as well as make possible its upshot: redemption.
But error comes first. After the travelers are disengaged from the mud hole, they eat fried chicken and ham and assess the near future. “When we crossed Hell Creek,” Boon explains, “we crossed Rubicon” and “set the bridge on fire.” They feel the frisson of liberation: “the very land itself seemed to have changed...the air was very urban.” Only automotive power -- such a novelty in 1905 -- allows them to barter the past for a future characterized by “the mechanized, the mobilized, the inescapable destiny of America.”
But such liberation comes at a cost. When the trio eventually finds the main road to Memphis -- “running string straight into distance” -- the world they once knew blurs into confusion. The geography outside the gunmetal doors -- “the Sabbath afternoon, workless, the cotton and corn growing unvexed now, the mules themselves sabbatical and idle in the pastures” -- becomes lost to Lucius, who recalls, “I couldn’t look at it...I was too busy, too concentrated.” Hurdling through space in metallic containment quietly erodes a sense of place and the integrity such a feeling nurtures. “It was Virtue who had given up, relinquished us to Non-virtue,” Lucius remembers thinking as the car kicked up dust. “The country itself was gone.”
And then they stop at Miss Reba’s. “You’ll like it,” Boon tells Lucius.
Lucius doesn’t like it. Lucius is horrified. His experiences at the brothel culminate in a coming-of-age sequence that includes a badly cut hand, copious tears, and the tectonic realization that “I knew too much, had seen too much; I was a child no longer now; innocence and childhood were forever lost, forever gone from me.”
But what never leaves Lucius is the potential for redemption. Redemption in The Reivers is embodied in the noble form of the horse. The relationship that Lucius and Ned develop with Lightening -- the bartered horse that Lucius eventually rides in two mile-long circles -- restores “the country itself” to a non-automotive pace and routine. It’s on the sweaty back of Lightening -- a horse maintained with mechanical precision by Ned -- that Lucius transcends his fate and recovers his virtue.
The Reivers ends with this moving restoration. On the way to the race, Ned and Lucius must load Lightening onto a train car. Once in the container, the “horse’s hot ammoniac reek...and the steady murmur of Ned’s voice” blend into something “concentrated” and ineffable. Lucius, a nervous wreck about the race, says he “actually realized not only how Lightening’s and my fate were now one, but that the two of us together carried that of the rest of us, too, certainly Boon’s and Ned’s, since on us depended under what conditions they could go back home.”
Lucius and Lightening, when the first ride begins, careen down the track “as though bolted together.” With that unification, all characters return home the wiser, knowing, as Grandpa Priest would soon tell Lucius, “nothing is forgotten.”
3.Today, more than 50 years after The Reivers was published, a cottage industry exists to teach us to slow down and simplify the hectic pace of contemporary life. Think Shop Class as Soul Craft, You are Not a Gadget, or Last Child in the Woods. It’s easy to dismiss this genre of literature as a wistful -- that word—blend of nostalgia and self-help. Reading The Reivers though, saps the impulse to mock. Although Boon is quick to note to that “if all the human race ever stops moving at the same instant, the surface of the earth will seize,” he also learns that slowing life down enough to watching mules on sabbatical can save your soul from the perils of speed.